Trainee Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE®) trainer Krzysztof Karauda says that we should let our bodies decide how to release tension, citing shaking and tremoring as natural ways to regain equilibrium after stressful situations.
Our bodies experience all kinds of emotions, including anxiety. We freeze, our muscles tense. After facing extremely stressful, life-threatening situations, animals start shuddering in order to readjust. Young children do the same, and one might say they’re simply shaking off their fear. This natural bodily reflex became the basis for TRE®, a therapeutic stress-relief technique.
Maria Hawranek: Could you explain what TRE is, in a nutshell?
Krzysztof Karauda: TRE stands for Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises. It’s a body workout method based on neurogenic tremors, a self-healing mechanism we are all genetically equipped with. These tremors occur spontaneously in stressful situations or directly afterward, and serve to regulate the nervous system and entire body. The bioenergetic therapist David Berceli noticed this over thirty years ago, and devised a method to remind people how to tap this natural resource.
I saw a video of a cheetah attacking an antelope. After seizing it by the throat, the cheetah is then forced to flee from a pack of hyenas. Once the cheetah has disappeared, the antelope initially lies motionless, but soon gets its breath back, and finally stands up, its whole body trembling. Do all animals react this way? Do humans, too?
Anyone who has seen a frightened dog must have noticed it shuddering. In the scientific paper “The Felid Purr: A Healing Mechanism?,” researcher Elizabeth von Muggenthaler noted that, since cat purring requires energy expenditure, which animals do not waste senselessly in dangerous situations, it must be somehow beneficial to their survival and self-healing process. The Canadian doctor Hans Selye, the first
